Post Office Characters, Collect Them All #2

I should save this for later, but I’ll probably ditch the character profiles after this anyway. This is about the strangest person I ever met at the Post Office, and possibly the strangest coworker and person I’ve ever dealt with.

I called him Camo Guy. Wearing camo gear was not that unusual at the Post Office. Most guys [and it was always guys] had a jacket or shirt in the traditional pattern. Some might have a hat or pants. Camo Guy took it to another dimension, never mind level. He had berets, desert clothing, and attire from countries that probably hadn’t existed since the end of the Cold War. He had attire suited to seemingly almost any terrain. The only thing I never saw him in was winter gear and I’m surprised he didn’t have some kind of all-white outfit for when it snowed.

His attire was the least strange thing about him.

Camo Guy’s two main interests were karate and Jesus, and he displayed both of his passions throughout the workday. On the flat sorter machine, you would occasionally have to “sweep,” that is, place the full tubs of mail on the conveyor belt and replace them with new ones. It was a good chance to move around a little bit, and boy did he ever. He spent his sweeping time practicing his karate forms, singing hymns, and yelling out his favorite Bible verses. Often, one of his fellow religious comrades who worked at a neighboring machine would shout out verses in response, all evening long. I still remember one hymn he sang, “Jesus on the Mainline,” which is one that the older people used to sing at the church where I grew up. I had never heard it anywhere else until hearing him sing it one night. “Jesus on the mainline, tell Him what you want, Jesus on the mainline, tell Him what you want, Jesus on the mainline, tell Him what you want, Jesus on the mainline now….” I was told later that he went to a smaller Pentecostal church that didn’t have a lot of younger people. Since there were so many televangelists operating out of our city, we had to run a lot of mail from them, and he would often point out ones with whom he had doctrinal disagreements.

Camo Guy was married, I think to someone he’d met while stationed in Germany. She was odd herself, and always wore this awful perfume that smelled like a sour pina colada. She was one of those people where you know something is off, and I disliked working with her. One night she got into it with one of the older regulars, this grey haired biker guy and I think she got walked out of the building after that. I believe they may have split up sometime while I was there.

Most people just worked around him, since although he did his basic job duties he wasn’t all there. People generally didn’t give him a hard time, even in a workforce where most people had anger issues. I don’t know if it was the karate or his childlike behavior softened people or at least made them less inclined to get impatient with him. I rarely saw him cross with anyone. Supervisors would try to get him to pay more attention but they usually just gave up. I sometimes thought he was playing a long con with everyone, convincing them he was too dumb to bother with and so he was left alone. One of the union stewards said they once saw three supervisors all yelling at him once and all he did was sit there and grin. He may have been the smartest guy in the entire building.

I sometimes look up former coworkers in this federal database just to see if they’re still working there, and I see that he’s been driving a truck for the Post Office for some time. This frightens me greatly.